Thursday, March 13, 2014

Principal regrets supporting and introducing common core into her school

Here’s a powerful piece about how an award-winning principal
went from being a Common Core supporter to an opponent. This was written by Carol
Burris, principal of South Side High School in New York. She was named the 2010
New York State Outstanding Educator by the School

Administrators Association of
New York State. She is one of the co-authors of the principals’ letter against
evaluating teachers by student test scores, which has been signed by 1,535 New
York principals.

By Carol BurrisWhen I first read about the Common Core State Standards, I
cheered. I believe that our schools
should teach all students (except for those who have severe learning
disabilities), the skills, habits and knowledge that they need to be successful
in post secondary education. That doesn’t mean that every teenager must be
prepared to enter Harvard, but it does mean that every young adult, with few
exceptions, should at least be prepared to enter their local community college.
That is how we give students a real choice.

I even co-authored a book, “Opening the Common Core,” on how
to help schools meet that goal. It is a
book about rich curriculum and equitable teaching practices, not about testing
and sanctions. We wrote it because we thought that the Common Core would be a
student-centered reform based on principles of equity.

I confess that I was naïve. I should have known in an age in
which standardized tests direct teaching and learning, that the standards
themselves would quickly become operationalized by tests. Testing, coupled with
the evaluation of teachers by scores, is driving its implementation. The
promise of the Common Core is dying and teaching and learning are being
distorted. The well that should sustain
the Core has been poisoned.I hear about those distortions every day. Many of the teachers in my high school are
also the parents of young children. They
come into my office with horror stories regarding the incessant pre-testing,
testing and test prep that is taking place in their own children’s
classrooms. Last month, a colleague gave
me a multiple-choice quiz taken by his seven-year old son during music. Here is a question: Kings and queens COMMISSIONED
Mozart to write symphonies for celebrations and ceremonies. What does
COMMISSION mean?

to force someone to do work against his or her willto divide a piece of music into different movementsto perform a long song accompanied by an orchestrato pay someone to create artwork or a piece of musicWhether or not learning the word ‘commission’ is appropriate
for second graders could be debated—I personally think it is a bit over the
top. What is of deeper concern, however,
is that during a time when 7 year olds should be listening to and making music,
they are instead taking a vocabulary quiz.

I think that the reason for the quiz is evident to anyone
who has been following the reform debate.
The Common Core places an extraordinary emphasis on vocabulary
development. Probably, the music teacher believes she must do her part in test
prep. More than likely she is being evaluated in part by the English Language
Arts test scores of the building. Teachers are engaged in practices like these
because they are pressured and afraid, not because they think the assessments
are educationally sound. Their principals are pressured and nervous about their
own scores and the school’s scores. Guaranteed, every child in the class feels
that pressure and trepidation as well.

An English teacher in my building came to me with a ‘reading
test’ that her third grader took. Her daughter did poorly on the test. As both a mother and an English teacher she
knew that the difficulty of the passage and the questions were way over grade
level. Her daughter, who is an excellent
reader, was crushed. She and I looked on
the side of the copy of the quiz and found the word “Pearson.” The school,
responding to pressure from New York State, had purchased test prep materials
from the company that makes the exam for the state.

I am troubled that a company that has a multi-million dollar
contract to create tests for the state should also be able to profit from
producing test prep materials. I am even more deeply troubled that this
wonderful little girl, whom I have known since she was born, is being subject
to this distortion of what her primary education should be.

There are so many stories that I could tell–the story of my
guidance counselor’s sixth-grade, learning disabled child who feels like a
failure due to constant testing, a principal of an elementary school who is
furious with having to use to use a book he deems inappropriate for third
graders because his district bought the State Education Department approved
common core curriculum, and the frustration of math teachers due to the
ever-changing rules regarding the use of calculators on the tests. And all of this is mixed with the toxic fear
that comes from knowing you will be evaluated by test results and that “your
score” will be known to any of your parents who ask.

When state education officials chide, “Don’t drill for the
test, it does not work”, teachers laugh. Of course test prep works. Every
parent who has ever paid hundreds of dollars for SAT prep knows it works —but
no parent is foolish enough to think that the average 56 point ‘coaching’ jump
in an SAT score means that their child is more “college ready.”Test scores are a rough proxy for learning. Tests
imperfectly examine selected domains of skills, so that we can infer what
students know. Real learning occurs in the mind of the learner when she makes
connections with prior learning, makes meaning, and retains that knowledge in
order to create additional meaning from new information. In short, with tests we see traces of
learning, not learning itself.

What occurs in a “data driven”, high-stakes learning
environment is that the full domain of what should be learned narrows to those
items tested. The Common Core, for
example, wants students to grow in five skill areas in English Language Arts —
reading, writing, speaking, listening and collaboration. But the Common Core
tests will only measure reading and writing.
Parents can expect that the other three will be neglected as teachers
frantically try to prepare students for the difficult and high-stakes tests. What gets measured gets done, and make no
mistake: “reformers” understand that full well.
In fact, they count on it. They see data, not children. For the corporate reformers, test data
constitute the bottom-line profits that they watch.

There is no one more knowledgeable about school change and
systemic reforms than Michael Fullan. He
is a renowned international authority on school reform, having been actively
engaged in both its implementation as well in the analysis of reform
results. I had the pleasure of listening
to him this week at the Long Island ASCD spring conference.Fullan told us that the present reforms are led by the wrong
drivers of change — individual accountability of teachers, linked to test
scores and punishment, cannot be successful in transforming schools. He told us that the Common Core standards
will fall of their own weight because standards and assessments, rather than
curriculum and instruction are driving the Common Core. He explained that the right driver of school
change is capacity building. Data should
be used as a strategy for improvement, not for accountability purposes. The Common Core is a powerful tool, but it is
being implemented using the wrong drivers.

Fullan helped to successfully lead the transformation of
schools in Ontario, Canada, and he has tried to influence our national
conversation, but his advice has been shunned.
I will close with a final quote from Fullan and let readers draw their
own conclusions:A fool with a tool is still a fool. A fool with a powerful tool is a dangerous
fool.